another one bites the dust

Philip Kennicott reviews the movie Traitor, starring the fine actor Don Cheadle:

Once again there are terrorists in our midst, and once again they are Muslims, hiding in sleeper cells, posing as ordinary Americans, waiting to cause mayhem. Heroic action is needed.

To save us from the terrorists?

More pressingly, to save us from films such as “Traitor,” a long-winded thriller starring Don Cheadle as a conflicted Muslim who is either an undercover U.S. operative or a ruthless killer, or maybe both.

Wait. It gets worse—or, rather, better [e.a.]:

The film’s moral reasoning is all parenthetical: There are bad guys out there (but they’re not all irredeemably bad), and while we must fight them, we shouldn’t sink to their level (except when we have to). This doesn’t add up to real nuance. It just encourages people to break the rules and feel bad about it. The film, which borrows a line from Samir as its subtitle (”The Truth Is Complicated”), would be stronger if it thought more simplistically: Terrorism is always wrong, as is breaking the laws of civilized behavior to fight it.

How hard is it for the makers of American popular entertainment to get this? Terrorism is always wrong, and so is the uncivilized behavior sometimes used to fight it.

I haven’t seen The Dark Knight, but from what I’ve read, that movie fails the morality test, too.

The Dark Knight does not provoke profound debate about our methods and purposes. It spectacularly affirms them. “We don’t get the hero we need,” Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon says, with Niebuhrian wistfulness, “we get the hero we deserve.”

Memo to Hollywood: one, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war. Get us rewrite!